October 17, 2026
The Lebanese government adopts an ambitious vision to integrate the country into the artificial intelligence economy, through the national strategy prepared by the Ministry of State for Technology and Artificial Intelligence under the title “The Republic Integrated with Artificial Intelligence.” The strategy aims to provide enablers that include a national financing fund, a package to activate artificial intelligence exports, and an infrastructure that includes designated areas and national data collections, while setting a goal to raise the percentage of use of these technologies from 27% to 50% among the Lebanese within two or three years. Despite these ambitions, the gap between the declared goals and practical reality is widening, given the fragility of the basic pillars of this industry, namely energy, communications, and data centers.
The power crisis is the biggest and most costly obstacle to running models and servers. Official feeding is limited to a few hours a day, forcing companies to rely on private generators. The Ministry set the price per kilowatt-hour for generators for the month of September at approximately 52,840 liras (equivalent to approximately 59 cents), a price that exceeds several times the cost of production at the Electricité du Liban. By approximate calculations, running a single server that consumes one kilowatt around the clock requires about 720 kilowatt-hours per month, so its bill exceeds $400 per month from the generator alone, independent of the costs of cooling, batteries, and outage protection systems, at a time when competing companies in neighboring countries calculate this cost in a few cents.
The telecommunications sector is no less bad, as the average fixed Internet speed in Lebanon did not exceed 16 megabits per second at the end of last year, recording a decline of about 7% within one year, which places Lebanon in the lagging ranks globally, while the cellular Internet is ahead by a noticeable margin. This means that the network responsible for transferring huge data between companies and servers suffers from slowness and lack of stability.
As for data centers, they remain limited in size and spread and rely on generators as a backup power source, which prompts startup companies to resort to hosting their data and running their models on external cloud servers. As a result, the local structure turns into a mere point of contact, and added value and operational spending are wasted in favor of other markets, while human competencies alone remain the most prominent bet for officials to invest in local energies and limit their migration.
This scene reveals that the actual competition of Lebanese companies is currently limited to developing applications and software solutions based on ready-made models and exporting them as services, in isolation from building a local computing infrastructure. Therefore, any national strategy for artificial intelligence remains hostage to radical reform of the electricity and communications sectors before talking about data pools and specialized regions, given the impossibility of an energy-based industry to flourish in a country that relies on local generators on rooftops to secure its electricity.
